Text: Every New Year’s Eve before midnight, you sit under a table and you eat 12 individual grapes, and supposedly it’s supposed to make it so that you find love or you make like a wish that comes true. The informant thinks you have to eat them all either before it hits midnight or as it hits midnight. 

Context: Informant in 20, half white half pacific islander, born in Washington and now going to school in Southern California. She herself has never practiced this tradition. She saw it on TikTok and was like what is this? And then she saw more TikToks and was like, now I know.

Analysis: This tradition no longer has roots, it isn’t traveling in the same way other traditions used to before the internet, as we’ve talked about before in class. The brothers Grimm and other proponents of ethnonationalism would have a stroke. My informant is still a passive bearer, but not in the usual way, she didn’t learn it from a group she’s in and doesn’t know where it came from originally. But weirdly if you think about it she does still have a group and that group is TikTok, a large nebulous group but a group all the same. I, who does not use TikTok, did not know this tradition, or I wasn’t in the right algorithm to see it when it came to Instagram. The algorithm opens up a whole other part of the interaction between digital orality and folklore groups. Folklore no longer can be tracked by location but what you know does tell us things about how you interact with the digital space.